


Sunflower Princess

by orphan_account



Category: AFI
Genre: Alternate Universe, First Kiss, High School, M/M, Suburbia, Summer, small town anst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-26
Updated: 2015-06-26
Packaged: 2018-04-06 07:39:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,150
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4213512
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Davey accidentally steals a bunch of flowers from Jade's garden.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sunflower Princess

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gothlorien (bananasintherough)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bananasintherough/gifts).



> I've been stuck too long in suburbia, so I wrote this as a temporary cure for the summer vacation blues. It'ss for my friend Gothlorien, who was kind enough to pass this glorious prompt on to me. The result ended up revoltingly sweet, for which I apologize. I know you all love pain so much. I don't own Davey and Jade and this never happened. I couldn't think of a title so I ripped off Refused.

It starts as a dumb pastime. Just something to do on those dull, too-bright summer days when everything is humming and sweltering and terrifically alive, and Davey wants to remind himself that there is an end to this awful season, there is an end to this awful _life_. He always gets depressed during the summer. His friends go away on family vacations and leave him alone with the smell of cow shit baking in the sun, of pears ripening in heat. Hawaii, Tahiti, Cuba, Mexico. Places Davey doesn’t want to go anyway; He can’t skate in the sand, and surfing would probably give him sunburns. He hates sunburns. 

So he walks to the cemetery. The one right beside campus which seems strange and eerie and haunted in the summer, no kids to litter its pavement in lunch boxes and book bags and sandwich crusts. He walks to the cemetery decidedly, resentfully alone and disrespects the dead. He sits and pulls up weeds and writes S.O.A lyrics on his shoe. He skates between the quiet, neat rows of granite headstones, ollying off the railing, making footprints in the half-dead grass covering the all-dead bodies. 

Maybe he’s more sentimental than he thinks, because after the first or second time, he starts to feel kind of guilty about it. Starts to get spooked out on his way home when the sun is setting like a big, golden fried egg doused in ketchup, leaking yolk onto pear orchard scoured hillsides, falling away and leaving the twilight dark and sweet-smelling with cooling pavement and sprinkler lawns. 

He skates to his house the long way, feeling creeped out by the barbecue dads in their American flag shorts, whistling along to the sizzle of hamburger fat. He feels judged and unreal as he rolls past kids in their swimsuits chasing each other down the sidewalk, riding their Big Wheels, shrieking and dancing. He feels like an outsider even more than he usually does, choked and so bored it hurts. He wonders about those dead people he walked over at the cemetery, wonders if they’re gonna whisper to each other through the dirt when he’s gone, about how that Davey kid is a sinner and a freak and probably a queer. He wonders if they’re gonna rise up, decaying in their American Flag shorts, their swimsuits, and come find him in his bed and kill him. 

He knows he’s going a little crazy, that it’s a stupid thing to think, that he’s being babyish and paranoid. But the summer kind of does that to him, makes him weird and stir-crazy and out of his mind with boredom and loneliness. So the next day when he starts his trek to the cemetery, he stops at a house with a garden and surreptitiously uses his pocket knife to slice an iris off of its stalk. Then he yanks out a few pansies, cringing as their roots trail crumbly dirt all over the side walk. Even though he checked to make sure there was no car in the driveway of this house, he still books it out of there fast, glancing over his shoulder at least ten times before he makes it to his destination. The suburbs are weird. You can never be too sure some concerned neighbor isn’t sitting at their table with binoculars looking for kids who steal flowers from the house down the block so they can report them at the next PTA meeting or whatever. 

Davey would rather have some live housewife think he’s a hooligan than some dead house wife follow him home from her grave and kill him while he’s sleeping, though. So he doesn’t feel too bad about it once he gets there. He picks the headstone with the coolest name, a slab of pale stone laid into the earth engraved in the absurdity _Forestt Crawligan_. Davey has always liked Forestt, his name makes him laugh, so he decides Forestt gets the iris and dirty pansy today. As a pardon, a plea with the dead for them to not kill him, just let him play among them, hang out while his friends are out of town and he’s just about dead himself, sick with heatstroke and restlessness and ennui. 

In turns into a habit, a stupid anxiety reducing ritual so he doesn’t have to stay up at night worrying about one more stupid, irrational thing. There are plenty of houses along the way from his house to the cemetery, but that one has the biggest garden, the most to choose from. He figures he can keep swiping a few flowers from that house each day and no one will notice, plus, there’s never a car in the driveway. They must work all afternoon or something. He thinks it will be fine. 

After a few visits he notices it’s kind of a weird house. Most of the houses in Ukiah are similar, low to the ground little boxes, old and quaint and very 50s. This house is shaped the same as the rest, but there’s a lot of weird clutter on the lawn. There are a few yards with a gnome or a flamingo or a jockey statue around, but this house has a whole host of characters, all of which are half-hidden by begonias and hydrangeas and what have you. They give Davey the illusion of being watched, snuck up on when he does find them. A triceratops made out of repurposed shovel spades and a rake. A dog’s disembodied ass, made to look like it’s digging. An unseasonable reindeer, fiberglass and so sun faded its once brown coat is a sick shade of salmon pink. A bunch of other things, creatures of plastic and plaster and sandstone and metal. 

Davey wonders what this family, with their nice garden and weird lawn ornaments, are like. If they wear American flag shorts and barbecue, or if they side-eye the rest of the neighborhood while they dig holes and plant things, judging the mess of suburban waste and predictability just as he does. Fortunately, he does not have to wonder for very long, because a few weeks after his initial pilfering, he gets caught. 

He’s leaning over the snapdragons, plucking a few stems now that he’s figured out it’s a less invasive way to go about stealing from someone’s garden than actually pulling plants up by the roots. There are already two purple petunias and an orange rose in his other fist when he hears the distinct sound of a screen door slamming. He freezes, hand convulsing and making his snapdragon snap. 

“Hey you. Flower thief,” a bored voice drawls from the porch. 

Davey’s cheeks color, and he stares at the ground, unable to look his company in the eye, even if he doesn’t sound particularly angry. “Um, sorry,” he mumbles, standing slowly, sweat running in rivulets down his uncombed hair and into the collar of his giant sized Misfits shirt with the sleeves cut out of it. “I didn’t mean to.” Then, as he guiltily meets the gaze of the guy on the porch, he drops his meager bouquet, stunned to clumsiness. “Whoa,” he says. Then, even more eloquently, “dude.” 

The kid on the porch is Jade Puget, a senior who graduated from Ukiah high a year ago, a punk who was in a few bands and somewhat regularly skated with Davey’s group of friends. Davey had always admired him to the point of mortifying half-infatuation, and now here he was, evidently home from college for the summer to catch Davey in the act of petty theft. _College_. It occurs to Davey that Jade is no longer a senior, but a college student. His cheeks color even deeper as Jade squints at him, coming down the steps off the porch with bare feet and rolled up sweat pants and nothing else. His chest is blindingly white, littered in freckles and he says, “Dave Marchand?” 

“Yeah,” Davey says stupidly, shuffling his vans together, kicking his board up into his hand like it might conceal that the hand in question formerly held stolen flowers. 

Jade grins a sideways grin that makes Davey’s stomach twist up in little knots. Jade crosses his arms, scratches a spot of peeling sunburn near his elbow with fingers so long and bony Davey has to stare. “You’re the flower thief, huh?” 

“I’m so sorry,” he says desperately, wondering how on earth he’s gonna explain that he was desecrating Jade’s yard because he was worried desecrating suburban graves might trigger zombie backlash. “I didn’t think you’d notice.” 

Jade gets closer, so close he’s standing right in front of Davey, so close Davey can smell his sweat through his deodorant and his hair gel and suddenly, he’s hugging him awkwardly, one of those weird, single-armed bro-hugs. “I didn’t notice,” Jade says, face in Davey’s ear as he squeezes him, then pats his back and releases him. “My mom did. Nothing gets by her, she’s so into her garden, dude. Like a week ago she’s all, ‘one of the irises is missing’ and ever since then she’s been cataloging losses and coming up with weird conspiracy theories about how some lady in her aerobics class is jealous and trying to sabotage her. But it was you the whole time?” 

“Yeah, just me,” Davey mumbles, wiping sweat from his brow with his forearm and squinting critically at Jade, trying to slow the rapid fire beat of his own heart. “I’m really, really sorry dude. It’s just such a nice garden,” he finishes lamely. He feels really nervous, way more nervous than when he shoplifts candy from the Circle K, which is a much higher-stakes theft job than swiping flowers from his high school kind-of-friend’s mom. 

It must have been the hug that has him all weird and shaky; he feels very confused about the fact he stood stalk-still and stunned while it happened. Davey is usually a unashamedly huggy guy, always grabbing his friends and riding on their backs and kissing their cheeks to make them scream and wipe his supposedly homo-germs off their skin. But when Jade touched him, he froze. He wanted to be over the whole infatuation thing he remembers from a year ago, but apparently he’s not. 

“I’ll tell her you think its a nice garden. It’ll make her day, she’s probably forgive the whole stealing thing and invite you over for dinner instead and grill you about what colleges you’re applying to or whatever,” Jade says, smiling that crooked smile again. 

Davey’s stomach flips over, either at the smile or at the idea of having dinner at Jade’s house, meeting his weird family with the weird lawn ornaments. “Yeah, ok,” he mumbles, hating how strange and high his voice sounds, not at all like it usually does. “That would be cool. Thanks.” 

“So what are you stealing flowers for anyway?” Jade asks, lacing his fingers behind his neck. The position reveals his underarms, and Davey tries not to stare at the sweat-damp mats of auburn pit hair, tries not to wonder why he feels compelled to look at these private, usually hidden bits of Jade in the first place. Jade cocks his head, stares at Davey with huge dark eyes the color of chocolate pudding. Then his smile gets kind of sly. “You’re bringing them to a girl, aren’t you?” 

Davey sees a golden opportunity to let himself off the hook for checking out Jade’s arm pits. “Yeah,” he lies, thinking it’s a simple lie, a safe one that won’t come bite him in the ass later because it’s not like Jade knows any better, it’s not like he goes to Ukiah High anymore, not like he’ll find out. “Flowers. For my girlfriend.” 

Jade raises his eyebrows, nodding knowingly like girlfriends are something he is an expert on. “Is she pretty?” 

Cheeks burning in a way Davey thinks must be giving him away, he answers, “Uh, yeah. _I_ think so, anyway.” 

“What does she look like?” Jade asks, eyes still so big and dark. Davey is squinting in the sun, wondering how on earth Jade can still look so doe-eyed in this reflective high-noon brightness. 

He swallows thickly, shading his gaze with an open palm so he can work on not screwing his face up so spectacularly in front of this college student, this former guitarist for very cool local bands, who is apparently impervious to the sun. “She’s short. Shorter than me,” he invents, picturing an average looking girl so he can describe someone that Jade would think was a plausible conquest for a high schooler. “And she’s got blue eyes, brown hair, like shoulder length. And uh...I dunno. A face and ears and a body and stuff. The usual.” 

Jade laughs and its an enormous relief to hear the sound of it. “Cool, good for you, dude. Well, I won’t keep you any longer. Go meet your girl, tell her the flowers are from Ms. Puget’s garden. If my mom were here she would probably give you a business card to give to her. She’s crazy about the flowers, dude. ” 

“Tell her I say hi,” Davey says awkwardly, heading back to the sidewalk with his board in hand after collecting his dropped and now wilting collection of flowers. He doesn’t think he’s ever even met Jade’s mom, so the sentiment seems stupid, hollow. “Say hi to your brother, too, if he’s around. And um, bye.” 

Jade shrugs his agonizingly white shoulders, and waves to Davey. “Smith’s at summer camp, but whatever. See ya,” he says, grinning. “Good luck with your girlfriend.”

After Davey hears the slam of the screen door, he lets out a long held-painful breath, and buries his face, hot and red, in his palms. As he skates to the cemetery, the summer feels different, somehow changed. Less suffocating, less blistering hot and achingly empty. He wonders if Jade’s sticking around until the fall. He wonders if he might want to hang out. It sure beats wondering if bodies are gonna kick their way out of their pine boxes and walk in a morbid, skeletal parade to his house and make him pay for leaving shoe prints in the grass upon their final resting places. He feels a little less depressed. A little less crazy. He thinks about Jade’s crooked teeth and his stupif tribal arm band tattoo, a twisting blackness stuck in so much freckled white. 

Davey decides to skate past Jade’s house again on the way to the cemetery the next day, even though he’s not planning on stealing flowers anymore. Appeasing the dead isn’t as pressing when there might be a real, live human to hang out with him. He tries in vain not to get his hopes up, tries not to imagine or internally rehearse the process of walking up Jade’s lawn to his porch and ringing the doorbell to see if he’s home and wants to skate. 

Luckily, he doesn’t have to worry about it, because as he rolls up to Jade’s house, he sees that Jade’s sitting out on the porch in the sun, pink and sweaty and comfortingly flawed. He’s wearing baggy black skate shorts and a ribbed white wife beater that clings to the cut of his ribs. Davey hops off his board and gets close enough he can see the muted pink of Jade’s nipples through that shirt, which makes him blush. His stomach flips over and he says, “hey.” 

“Hey,” Jade answers, standing. “So I told my mom she could relax about the aerobics lady, that it was only Dave Marchand picking flowers for his girlfriend.” 

The lie in all its stupidity and fabricated detail comes back to Davey, and he feels incredibly dumb for inventing it in the first place. “What did she say?” he asks through a cringe. 

“She thought it was sweet. But she told me that I should go with you to meet your girlfriend, so I could decide for myself if she was pretty enough for her prize flowers or not. She takes her flowers so serious, man.” 

Davey stares, dumbstruck as Jade starts walking towards the side of the house, were his skateboard is propped up in the side yard. “She said that?” Davey asks, mouth dry. He may not have actually met Ms. Puget, but he suspects on a gut level that Jade is making this up. It seems like a really weird thing for a mom to say. Perplexed, he decides to play along. 

“Yeah,” Jade answers, calling over his shoulder. “She said you could keep picking flowers if I approve of the girl, as long as you don’t take any of the lilies. She loves the lilies.” 

Davey wants very badly to hang out with Jade. So badly he wishes he really did have a girlfriend with blue eyes and brown hair and a face and ears and a body and stuff, so that he could introduce her to Jade, so that he could have a friend this summer without the friendship being built on some idiotic lie he made up to obscure the fact that he had been looking too long at Jade’s pit hair. 

He wants to hang out with Jade and his imaginary girlfriend all summer, an inseparable triad. He wants to get snow cones with them, he wants Jade to drive them out to Petaluma for shows, he wants to watch the sunset with them and eat junior mints out of the box, share them with Jade. Then he realizes than in his fantasies about the inseparable triad, his fake girlfriend isn’t really there, she’s just a vague, hazy hologram. He actually just wants to do all those things with Jade as Jade alone. Of course.

He wants it badly enough in this moment, though, that he decides that addressing the fake girlfriend thing can wait until the last possible moment. He’ll figure something out when he has to. Right now Jade is offering to skate with him to meet this girl, and he doesn’t want to risk that outing by revealing that there is no girl to meet. “Sure,” he says, calm and cool like this isn’t a total lie. He feels alright about it though because he’s pretty sure Jade’s lying, too, about his mom advising him to judge the prettiness of his girlfriend to see if she is a suitable match for the prettiness of her flowers. But maybe not. She does seem like a weird lady, if only because she has a fiberglass reindeer decoration hiding in her rose bushes in the middle of June. “We meet at the cemetery by school,” Davey says. 

“Romantic,” Jade says with a grin, dropping his board to the pavement. “Let’s go.” 

Davey and Jade skate three quarters of the way there, then walk the final stretch carrying their boards because they get tired of shouting over the clack of wheels against hot asphalt in order to talk about stuff. 

It feels so good to talk, so good to catch up. Davey didn’t fully realize how weird and gross he was getting by himself, but it was pretty weird and gross. He listens to Jade talk about college, about Berkeley, about Gilman shows and the tagging the abandoned train station in West Oakland and getting chased by the cops. It makes his heart ache, makes his skin crawl, makes his desire to get out of this stupid little town and its dreary suburban claustrophobia all the more urgent, makes him desperately hate the endless sprawl of pears and neat green lawns all burning up under the sun. 

When they get to the cemetery, Jade looks around and asks, “Where is she?” 

“Not here yet,” Davey answers automatically, shrugging, hating himself for how easy it is to lie. 

They hop the fence and walk together down the half-shaded pathways through the rows of graves. Davey shows Jade Forestt Crawligan, and they both laugh at his name before they sit down on a headstone adjacent to it, shoulders jostling together. Jade reaches for the hoop in Davey’s left ear, the one with the tiny inverted cross dangling from it. “This is new. How did you parents let you get this? Aren’t they super religious?” 

Davey shrugs, cheeks hot as Jade’s fingers accidentally brush against his jawline while he examines the charm. “Yeah, but I just take the cross off and leave the earring in when I go home. They don’t notice. They hate the piercing, too, but just in an eye-rolling way. Not enough to make me take it out.” 

“Why an upside down cross? You hate god that much?” Jade asks, smirking. 

Davey pulls away, out of Jade’s grip which is too much, too close. It’s making his heart fast and noisy, so much so Davey’s pretty certain Jade must hear it, must be putting together how nervous he makes him and wondering what that means. It’s no secret that everyone, even Davey’s friends, tease him for possibly being queer. He likes to let the rumor rage unconfirmed and un-denied, because he thinks it makes him more mysterious. It also saves him from having an answer a question about himself he doesn’t really know the answer to. “I don’t hate god,” Davey explains. “Just his fans.” 

Jade laughs, nodding. “Fair enough. They’re the worse fans, pretty much.” 

They sit for awhile, listening to the frantic, constant buzzing of insects around them. Davey’s pouring sweat under his shirt and he wants to take it off, but feels like he can’t be half-naked around Jade for some reason, feels like it’s too intimate, too obvious. Like staring at someone’s underarms, seeing someone at his own house, in his holy grey sweats, barefoot. To fill the painful silence, he says stupidly, “It’s so quiet.” 

Jade picks up a stick off the ground beside Forestt’s grave and idly digs a hole in the dirt with it. Disrespecting the dead. It makes Davey’s chest flare with a weird spike of longing. “Yeah,” Jade says lamely, then looks at Davey with those pudding brown eyes. “So... did your girlfriend stand you up?” 

Davey’s stomach plummets and he looks away, swallowing with a loud, shamed gulping sound. “Um,” he starts, hiding his face in his hands because he knows how incriminatingly red it is right now. “I have to tell you something.” 

“Ok,” Jade says carefully. He gets tight and stiff beside Davey, like he’s tensing for impact. 

“There is no girl coming. I don’t have a girlfriend,” he admits in a mumble. 

“Oh,” Jade answers dumbly, leaning into Davey for a second, the outside of his arm pressing into Davey’s bicep so firmly it sticks, adhered with a layer of sweat. They he moves away, peeling their skin apart. “Then....why were you stealing flowers?” he asks eventually.

Davey laughs weak and sheepish, pulls his face out of his palms and grins a reckless, self-effacing grin. “It’s really stupid. I just...all my friends are on vacation and I’ve been so fucking bored, dude. So I just come to the cemetery to skate by myself. And I started to bring flowers because I felt kind of weird and guilty about coming here for no reason, like without anyone to mourn or whatever.” 

Jade grins back. “So we’re just at the cemetery because you like it here?” 

Davey nods. “Yeah. We’re just hanging out at the cemetery because I think it’s cool.”

“How romantic,” Jade says, looking away, lips still twisted up into a smile. Davey’s guts seize up, his heart stopping for a second before it speeds to racing again, as noisy as ever. As he’s trying to figure out how to respond to that without his voice shaking or without saying something dumb, Jade asks, “so, what do you like about the cemetery? There are a lot of crosses here for a guy who supposedly hates god’s fans so much.” 

Davey smiles, licks his lips, stares at his shoes. Thinks of snow-cones and shared junior mints and sunsets, trying not to get ahead of himself, failing. “I dunno,” he says. “It’s peaceful. There are rails to grind, and its just something to do. When I’m bored, you know.” 

Jade nods, then turns to study Davey, a weird look on his face. “You also smile a lot for a guy who hates god’s fans. And for a guy who hangs out in a graveyard for fun. I thought graveyard kids were supposed to be solemn and stuff.” 

Davey tries to say something, but smiles his way through it and Jade cuts him off, says, “See?!” and points at him with one of those insanely long fingers. After they stop laughing, Jade adds, “Well, if you want to do more than mope around a bunch of dead people with your skateboard, you can hang out with me. I’m home for another month at least and I’ve been bored as fuck, too. All my friends are doing internships or whatever, they’ve scattered all over, so I’ve just been babysitting my youngest brother while my parents are working. So yeah, if you want to listen to records, or skate. Or whatever.” 

Davey is internally cheering, but he manages to keep it under control, keeping his voice from sounding too reedy as he answers, “Yeah. That’d be cool.” 

“So,” Jade says, kicking the stick he was formerly using as a shovel. It bounces unceremoniously off of Forestt’s flat headstone, skitters across the grass at an angle. “What do you do for fun here? Conduct seances? Do you ever bring an Ouija board?” 

Davey shakes his head, scoffing. “No dude, it’s not like I’m _into_ death. I just get bored of _life_. There’s a difference. Like I’d rather be somewhere quiet where there aren’t gross loud families grilling dead animals and wasting water to keep their dumb little square of lawn green. I can just be alone not think about them.” 

Jade nods and says, “fair enough” while he thoughtfully picks at the dog-ear of a sticker on his skateboard. It’s the logo of some band Davey’s never heard of, and he’s trying to work up the nerve to ask about it and risk sounding lame when Jade says, “So I get why you stole the flowers. Kind of. You’re weird. But why did you lie about having a girlfriend? That’s beyond weird. That’s suspicious.”

“Suspicious?!” Davey spits, getting up and tossing his board to the pathway so he can skate instead of just sitting there next to Jade with his skin itching, his shoes tapping. He rolls around aimlessly as he admits, “Um, I don’t actually know why. Like you suggested it and then it just seemed like a better reason than what I was _really_ doing? But it was a stupid thing to lie about, man.” Davey keeps skating idly in circles and flipping his board, landing it only half the time. The sound of it hitting the pavement rings out over the humming of insects, rhythmic and steady like a heartbeat. 

“Do you even like girls?” Jade asks him casually, nonchalantly, while he looks towards campus like he doesn’t care one bit how Davey answers his question, because there are empty football fields to gaze upon contemplatively instead. 

Davey’s eyes snap up towards Jade, his cheeks get hot. “I guess? Not really,” he says, which is kind of the truth. 

“Boys, then?” Jade asks, just as casually, just as nonchalantly. 

Davey cuts his gaze immediately back to the ground under his feet, pavement dusted in gravel and loose dirt and dried up weeds. He swallows and mumbles, “No,” which is kind of a lie. 

“Just dead people,” Jade says. 

“Or no people at all? People suck,” Davey offers instead, which is _definitely_ a lie. He’s pretty sure he likes Jade more than he likes dead people. He’d much rather hang out with him at the cemetery than hang out at the cemetery alone, anyway. He’d even like to bring him flowers more than he would like to bring Forestt Crawligan flowers, though in that occasion he’d at least steal them from another garden. He doesn’t think Jade would appreciate flowers yanked out of his own garden. 

“Huh,” Jade says, getting up and walking towards Davey with his board like he’s gonna come fool around with him, gonna join in the lazy board flipping. Instead he tosses it to the ground and it rolls a few feet away. He leaves it and approaches Davey, reaches out with the toe of his sneaker and steals Davey’s board out from under him with a swift backwards kick. 

Newly board-less, Davey stumbles then stands dumb and and stricken, staring at Jade with wide eyes as Jade keeps crowding into him, closer and closer until he’s inches away, standing in Davey’s shadow, blocking the sunlight with the span of his shoulders in that clinging white fabric. “I think you’re lying again,” he says, voice low, half a smile quirking his mouth up at the left corner. He licks his lower lip nervously and Davey can smell his sunscreen he’s so close, can count the scatter of freckles on his burned nose, make out a tiny white scar on his cheek from where he picked a spot of acne or something. It all makes Davey’s mouth go dry, makes him want to press his mouth to the sprinkler and drink. 

“What?” Davey makes himself say, grinding his teeth but otherwise as paralyzed as he was when Jade unexpectedly hugged him yesterday. He’s confused, stuck, broken, short-circuiting. He feels like Jade is hitting on him, and that seems impossible. 

“I think you’re lying about not liking anyone. I notice the way you look at me. It’s ok,” Jade says, reaching for Davey’s lower back with those freakish fingers. He sneaks them into the overlarge sleeve of his shirt, slides them up the sweat-slick divot in his back, leaning in so his forehead brushes against Davey’s.

It occurs to him that Jade is _definitely_ hitting on him, which is evidently not impossible. It occurs to him that he should do something about it, but most of him is still too stunned to move. However, his dick stirs in his shorts, his eyes get heavy and half-lidded as Jade breathes onto his mouth, breath ragged and too-warm and Coke-sweet. “Are you freaked out?” Jade murmurs, fingers still climbing up Davey’s ribs, roving around under the humid tend of his shirt. “You want me to stop?”

Miraculously, Davey makes a word come out of him, though it feels like an agonizingly huge victory. “No,” he groans emphatically, brow sliding against Jade’s as he shakes his head, forces his hands, which had been hanging at his sides like dead skeleton arms, to reach for Jade. He grabs his neck, thumbs roughly into the hollow of Jade’s throat which is sun-flushed and beaded in sweat. “No.” 

Then, as if he has been given explicit permission to, Jade tilts Davey’s face up and kisses him hard. Teases Davey’s apart with the tip of his tongue, so much more wet and slick and summer-hot than Davey could have ever imagined kissing someone would feel like. The thing is, Davey doesn’t know how to kiss. He hasn’t done it before, not really, unless you count playground stuff in elementary school or the time his cousin made him close his eyes before she stuck her tongue down his throat one Thanksgiving. Aside from those terrible accidents, this is entirely new. 

Luckily, Jade _does_ know how to kiss. He kisses Davey like he’s been planning it, like he’s been thinking about it ever since he watched Davey yank snapdragons out of his mom’s prize garden. He holds his head steady with one broad, calloused palm and nips his lower lip, he breathes into him deep and solid and aching, he licks into the corner of his mouth before scraping his jaw with his teeth. It’s so good Davey can’t breathe, so good he’s gonna pass out if he doesn’t get some air soon. 

They break apart panting and Davey almost falls over, heart pounding, swollen mouth split into a wild, frantic smile. One too big and thrilled for a kid who’s been hanging out in a graveyard all summer. Jade leans in and licks his teeth, holds his chin between his thumbs and stares at Davey’s flushed, shining face like he’s found something really exciting in the least exciting place of all time. “You have such a good smile, dude. Makes me want to punch it off you,” he tells him. 

“How romantic,” Davey mumbles, blinking, pitching forward, licking sweat from Jade’s neck because it’s dripping down the tendons there and he feels stupid and wild and hungry and salt-starved. 

Jade gasps a little, threads his hand up through Davey’s mess of dyed and tangled hair and breathes from it. “Can I kiss you instead of punching you?” he says, voice muffled. 

“Yeah,” Davey answers breathlessly, grabbing at Jade’s tank top with his fists, pulling it up so he can touch his stomach with curious hands, the layer of softness over muted musculature beneath. “Yeah you can.” 

Then Jade does, and Davey’s not so sure what happens after that, but he knows it’s really, really good. 

When it starts to get dark they decide they should probably skate home, though Davey kind of feels like dealing with worried parents and inevitable reprimands can’t be worse that quitting what he’s doing right now, which is rolling around in the dead grass at the cemetery with Jade Puget for three hours. When they finally make themselves wrench away from each other and head towards the parking lot, Davey keeps finding new scrapes on his body, keeps picking bits of debris and dirt out of his clothes. He keeps smiling, uncontrollable and wild and thrilling. 

Jade pats him down, plucks some grass and twigs from his hair, bending close enough to press a few heavy, damp kisses to his neck, itchy and pink and burnt. Davey hates sunburns, but he guesses this one is okay.

They skate home, exchanging heated grins at one another every few blocks, the town feeling electrified, charged, ready to implode with the intensity of whatever was born in the cemetery today. Davey can’t even remember what it felt like yesterday or the day before, he can’t even really recall the stretched out, dull burn of emptiness he had been feeling. He can’t remember why he thought it was so important to bring flowers to the cemetery. But he doesn’t care. He’s just glad he _did_ think it was important, because otherwise he might not have stuck his fingers in Jade’s garden in the first place. 

When they reach Jade’s house, there’s no goodbye kiss, but Davey can tell Jade wants to, can feel the magnetic draw between them, can see the same bright-eyed, crazy smile he can’t stop smiling reflected on Jade’s face. “See you tomorrow?” he says, waving awkwardly, skin tingling in all the places Jade touched him today, waistband chaffing against a bite mark near his hip. His stomach flips over at the memory, grin growing wider, more explosive, enough to split the whole town in two. 

“Yeah,” Jade says, shrugging, trying not to smirk and failing, backing up towards his porch reluctantly. “Just come knock on my door when you’re ready. To hang out. And. Um,” He glances at the garden, then decidedly heads over to his mother’s spectacular iris plant. He examines it for a few seconds, then snaps off one of the more wilted blooms, one on its way out. Eyes downcast, Jade walks back to Davey and tucks the iris into Davey’s back pocket, face flushed sheepishly. “My mom said that an iris was the first loss. So, you can have one. Since you like them so much.” 

Davey wants so very badly to jump on top of Jade and kiss the breath out of him that he actually has to grip his own hands together to hold himself back from doing it. He smiles, catches Jade’s eyes and holds the gaze too long, until his stomach is burning and twisting and his dick is half hard again. “Thanks,” he mumbles, shoving his hands into his pockets. He didn’t have any particular preference for irises before tonight, but now he sure does. 

As he skates home by twilight, he doesn’t even see the families with their hotdogs and their foil wrapped corn on the cob, he forgets their fireworks and RVs and lawnmower roar that wakes him up every Friday when the gardeners come. He doesn’t worry about the potential threat of zombie redemption. He just skates, smiling to himself in the fading light of dusk, thinking of Jade’s hands, Jade’s eyes like pudding, his underarm hair matted with sweat. And he decides that maybe this season isn’t so awful, maybe he doesn’t want it to end after all.


End file.
